Context-aware computing is the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, and other environmental information to anticipate an end user's immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions. Smart homes connect all the devices and...

Mobile applications are required to operate in environments characterised by change. More specifically, the availability of resources and services may change significantly during a typical period of system operation. As a consequence, adaptive mobile applications need to be capable of adapting to these changes to ensure they offer the best possible level of service to the user. Our experiences ...

Modern smartphones provide sensors that can be used to describe the current context of the device and its user. Contextual knowledge allows software systems to adapt to personal preferences of users and to make data processing context-aware. Different sensors or measurement approaches used for recognizing the values of particular context elements vary greatly in their energy consumption. This p...

In the project Sonic City, we have developed a system that enables users to create electronic music in real time by walking through and interacting with the urban environment. We explore the use of public space and everyday behaviours for creative purposes, in particular the city as an interface and mobility as an interaction model for electronic music making. A multi-disciplinary design proces...

What: We are exploring the use of a shoe-mounted camera as a sensory system for wearable computing. We are developing a system called Platform Shoe which is useful for gait analysis, obstacle detection, and context recognition [2]. Platform Shoe uses visual information alone to detect periods of stability and motion during walking – no inertial sensor is required. In the stable phase of walking...

Context and context-awareness provides computing environments with the ability to usefully adapt the services or information they provide. It is the ability to implicitly sense and automatically derive the user needs that separates context-aware applications from traditionally designed applications, and this makes them more attentive, responsive, and aware of their user’s identity, and their us...

Current mobile context-aware applications for pervasive environments have been designed to consume information from computational nodes or devices in their surroundings or environments. As the hardware industry continues making much smaller, compact and cheap hardware, the vision of having plenty of very small powerful digital networking nodes in, for e.g., the living room or bedroom, is not so...

Development of context-aware applications is inherently complex. These applications adapt to changing context information: physical context, computational context, and user context/tasks. Context information is gathered from a variety of sources that differ in the quality of information they produce and that are often failure prone. The pervasive computing community increasingly understands tha...

The dynamic adaptation of running service-based applications without stopping has long been shown to be more than a dream for designers and developers. Recently, several works have been proposed in the literature, where most of them do not have a clear and complete process of adaptation or count on a specific plat-form that decreases the use of these adaptable large-scale applications. This pap...

This paper investigates the potential use of problem descriptions to represent and analyse variability in context-aware software products. By context-aware, we refer to recognition of changes in properties of external domains, which are recognised as affecting the behaviour of products. There are many reasons for changes in the operating environment, from fluctuating resources upon which the pr...